A modern girl's guide to TV Land

Please congratulate me on finally joining the 21st century, as Saturday morning, I upgraded my cable system to include DVR. I know! It's like I plunged head-first into 2005! AND, because I didn't want my in-home entertainment options to end there - or, actually, it was because my neighborhood Hollywood Video store suddenly shut down last week - I also splurged another $5 a month and signed up for Netflix. Crazy, I know. Next thing you know, I'll be starting one of those web-bloggy-things all those hipster kids have. Oh, wait...

I'm writing this four minutes before Mad Men is supposed to start, and I'm resisting every natural instinct I have to sit down and watch it in real time; I've double- and triple-checked, and I am trusting in the fact that it's going to be recorded. Even though - defying all logic - my television set IS TURNED OFF. It's high anxiety time over here, but I guess it's just one of those rites of passage every technology pioneer has to go through. (Can you tell I was never one to use a VCR for anything besides renting videos?)

A nice side effect of getting DVR was the four-hour window in which I was instructed to wait for the cable company. I woke up at 7:30 on Saturday morning, in order to get dressed, get coffee, and make it back to my apartment by 8:00 AM. I spent the first 30 minutes or so drinking my coffee, and then the next three hours, fueled by caffeine and the fact that I could not leave the house, cleaning my apartment. And by cleaning my apartment, I don't mean picking up the clothes that are strewn all over my ironing board and various corners of my bedroom - no, those, sadly, are still there. Instead, I finally decided to tackle the carpet that's been bugging me for the last few years or so, as stains have seemed to multiply without reason.

I poured a solution of white vinegar and water, and, with rag-to-rug, seriously scrubbed every single stain I could see. (Note to self: next time, vacuum first.) I have more work to do in my bedroom, but the living room and dining room carpets are as clean as I've ever seen them. I also did laundry and picked up the rest of the apartment, but the clean carpet was what made my weekend. You know, besides commercial-free, favorite-shows-at-my-leisure TV.

In addition to getting the DVR, I also switched out my HBO for Showtime. This is the second year in a row I've canceled HBO after Entourage ended, but this year I figured I would try something new. Most of the Showtime shows seem to be critically acclaimed and water cooler-worthy, but since I'm coming in halfway through the season on Dexter and Californication, I'm a little shy about starting. It's like I need to catch the first episode of something in order to appreciate it, even though there are obviously a ton of series I never started watching like that and enjoyed just the same. Mad Men is one. How I Met Your Mother is another. I just started watching that last year, and loved it so much, I went out and rented prior seasons on DVD. And speaking of TV (which I feel like I may be doing a lot, from now on), I have to talk about another show I've found myself inexplicably in love with: Roseanne.

I watched Roseanne back when I was in high school, but I never really liked it. The kids were just about my age - Becky a year older than me, Darlene a year younger - and I usually always related to the "kid" characters back then. Their storylines typically mirrored my lifestyle: worries about boys, puberty, popularity. The Connor family, though, was different. I didn't aspire to be either one of the girls, and while they had some funny lines, I remember thinking the whole show was just so over-the-top in its humor - I mean, no one really talked like that - that I couldn't relate. While now, I understand that Roseanne's breed of humor was fairly groundbreaking, at the time, the whole show and it's loud, crass, insult-flinging, poor-white-trash-attitude rubbed me the wrong way.

So when I started catching reruns on TV Land, I was amazed at how laugh-out-loud funny the show seemed to be. Rather than relate to the kids, I found myself naturally identifying with Roseanne; while her life most definitely was not aspirational, and the outlandish writing was still there, it didn't strike me as fake this time, but rather the opposite - raw and real. It's probably no coincidence that I got hooked last winter, at the bottom of a bad economy; while my lifestyle, thankfully, isn't as dire as theirs, I can, for the first time, understand it. And I don't know. I think a lot of the jokes and storylines went over my head, the first time around. The gay characters, the empty nest, the general working-class hardships... I think, as a kid, I was disappointed that this wasn't a classic sitcom, but as an adult, I'm in love with it for being so different.